Window on WANs

The best WAN advice of 2012

What were the most popular tips for network engineers and IT managers dealing with enterprise wide area networks (WANs) in 2012? We took the top five advice articles from SearchEnterpriseWAN.com to give you a countdown of the year’s most pertinent tips:

It’s no secret mobile devices have infiltrated enterprise networks, whether through the consumerization of IT or through BYOD policies. In turn, IT managers have seen more network traffic coming from mobile applications. How can IT calculate the bandwidth requirements for these mobile applications? Tip writer Michael Finneran takes you through the calculations in this top tip of 2012.

Despite the hype around video conferencing and other real-time based applications, a great deal of network traffic is still based on TCP/IP. In this tip, WAN optimization expert Henry Svendblad offers three ways for enterprises to optimize TCP-based network traffic.

As cheap as bandwidth has become, it’s still a huge enterprise expense. Often times, the bandwidth enterprises pay for is not what they are getting in terms of network throughput. That’s why we asked network testing guru Kevin Tolly to give us tips on how to measure wide area network throughput. In this article he shows us how to use free networking tool, iPerf, to accomplish this.

Since the term “virtualization” was coined, the tech industry has gone to great lengths to virtualize just about everything imaginable — including WAN optimization controllers (WOCs). While at first virtual WOCs performed less efficiently than their hardware counterparts, that no longer speaks true today. Nemertes Research Principal Analyst John Burke presents these tips to help IT decide between hardware and software (virtual) WAN optimizers.

More than measuring network throughput, calculating bandwidth and choosing WAN optimization controllers — IT managers have wanted nothing more than to make the right telecom service decision. The most popular WAN connectivity options have included Ethernet and MPLS. Experts Johna Till Johnson and Paul Kirvan explain the benefits and drawbacks of each and list them neatly in this tech comparison chart.

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About This Blog

This blog contains wide area network (WAN) news and views for network professionals who are charged with implementing, maintaining and administering enterprise WANs. Target topics include WAN optimization and acceleration, virtualization, VPN security and WAN design.